


Pest Control

by Nitrobot



Category: Transformers: Prime
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Mind Control, Transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-20
Updated: 2017-12-20
Packaged: 2019-02-17 14:46:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13079145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nitrobot/pseuds/Nitrobot
Summary: Transformers transform. It's right there in the name. But Megatron has noticed that he's changing like no Transformer should be…It all started with the Insecticon.[takes place after Armada and assuming one of the Starscream clones betrayed the original and is now working for Megs]





	Pest Control

**Author's Note:**

> I'd written this for Halloween but due to certain circumstances I wasn't able to post it until now. Just turn off the lights and pretend that it's spooky.

It had been days, weeks even since he fought the first Insecticon and taken over the rest of its brethren; yet no matter how he scrubbed and cursed and clawed at the stains, Megatron couldn't get the creature’s energon off his armour. Not matter how much he scraped, sanded, pulled and picked....

Even now, in the core of his warship behind legions of soldiers and homegrown monsters and walls of steel, he tried to pry the thick layer of mold-hued blue off his servo with his claws, if only to distract himself from Starscream- or rather, his clone- squawking and preening behind him. If this Starscream was anything like the original, Megatron doubted he was saying anything worth listening to anyway. He might have wondered why he hadn’t just killed him already if he wasn't otherwise occupied. With the scratching. Scratching at the stain. The congealed lumps glued to his armour, refusing to give in to his incessant claws.

Usually he kept his talons folded behind him, a subtle deference to his so-called loyal soldiers with an even subtler threat hidden in how quickly he could unveil them, how he rarely even needed to turn towards a threat when his weapons protected his back. But that was hardly a concern now. 

It only occurred to Megatron recently that it wasn't just a stain. It was as if it had fused with the armour itself, leaching past the tempered metal to even dye his protoform in a sickly mottle of coal dust and electric blood. Somehow his past as a miner and gladiator collided together in that patchwork, and he found himself favoring his soiled but solid armour to hide it whenever he could. He hadn't seen his protoform for weeks now, wouldn't have expected the mock bruising to spread. He didn't know how much of his protoform was now infected.

If only Shockwave was here, he might have known why the Insecticon had such stubborn energon. He didn't trust Knockout to deal with it, not when he'd more likely turn him into a test subject than be of any help. Even worse, the medic might just tell him to wear something else which simply wasn't an option. This same armour had saved him from countless battles and cave ins, had carried him from the pits of Kaon to the ruins of Iacon, across light years and nebulae and would see Optimus Prime’s death before he retired it.

But he just couldn’t. Stop. Scratching.

Scratch.

Scratch.

Scrape.

_Shink._

Megatron jolted from a lash of pain along his spinal strut, one that lingered in the nodes of his limbs and most notably, most sharply in his arm. Old injuries from particular gladiator matches still haunted him centuries later, but this was very different. The pain didn't fade, only throbbed worse as his spark picked up a cautious pace, and his claws felt wet. 

He looked down at them, only now noticing they were far longer, like needle spires bolted to his hands, than he remembered. When had that happened? The wetness was as much a mystery as well, until he looked past his narrowed claws to what they'd been scratching at. There he saw not just the plagued armour, but the diseased protoform he'd tried to hide from.

When he'd thought his claws were having no effect on the mark, mindlessly working against it and the surrounding grey, they were actually slowly grinding down the surface of the metal. Slowly at first, then more and more as his mind drifted and he obviously worked for hours on digging through the metal like a desperate prisoner painstakingly boring a tunnel to escape. Now that he'd reached the lowest, thickest and weakest layer of his armour, his talons slipped under the weld-like stain. But rather than finally pulling it free and easing his spark, his claws had pierced right down to his protoform and now welled with his own energon pooling out of the deep gashes he'd blindly made. His own energon… yet it was the same colour as what he’d spilled from the Insecticon. The same that plagued him and spoiled his armour, fed right into his skin and Primus knows how much deeper.

Even as he watched in a fast dawn of horror, his own energon quickly dried to clog the damage he'd made, and he couldn't even tell what was his own and what was foreign.

In that instant Megatron saw why he couldn't get the stain off, how it had reached right down to his skin and scarred him so badly. The affected armour and protoform were firmly connected, a thick chitinous shell that eventually encased his entire frame without him even noticing. To claw it away would be to strip his own skin, veins and nerve nodes down to their molecules, and all he would see was that those molecules were now of Insecticon make.

His talons too, thin and precise and nothing like those he'd torn bots apart with, were more Insecticon than anything else.  
In his slackened jaw his glossa snapped against denta far sharper than he remembered them being, and his chin was damp with a thick stream of viscous drool. He carefully scraped the tip of his claw that was not his claw along the scars around his mouth, gathering what was too thick to just be saliva. Whatever it was, it was that same cursed colour. Not blue, not black, not Cybertronian. Iridescent death like a toxic oil bubbling up from his spark… from his throat.   
Filling up his mouth, flooding out just like the wound he'd made that released the poison now flowing through his guts. 

His vision fell low, the hard thud of his knees hitting the floor ringing through his mutated frame much later than the impact itself. It was like swimming in Red Energon- everything around him slowed to a crawl as the rest of his body went into overdrive. He was horribly, intimately aware of the ooze covering his entire frame even as it forced its way out his throat, a never-ending pulse like the flow from a slit jugular that drenched the armour that was now killing him after so long spent protecting him. 

But worst of all was the fact that Starscream was so absorbed in himself that he only just noticed that something was wrong, and his shriek was even more painful to hear with every one of Megatron’s senses set on fire.

“M-Master? Are you unwell?”

Megatron tried to bark back, but he could only choke on the sludge that seemed to crawl out and over his lips. He couldn't even force himself to stand- when he summoned the strength to lift a servo, it only dripped with the vile oil that solidified instantly and anchored him to the floor. His fusion cannon was a lost cause, barely even humming when he tried to activate it, and though his sword broke through the chitin it was soon swarmed and encased with even more of it.

And still, with his liege about to be trapped in a living shell, Starscream wouldn't shut up. “Is… is it the Dark Energon-?”

Megatron spat out the sludge, scraped it off his glossa with teeth sharp enough to peel his taste nodes away, and summoned two words from the wreck of his vocaliser.

“Get… out.”

The only thing he felt other than agony and confusion was anger, _humiliation_ ; being bested by some invisible force in his own warship, while his so-called soldiers just watched on! He would beat it, knew he could, but not with everyone watching with that emotion he hated above all others- pity.

“ **GET OUT** , ALL OF YOU, YOU WRETCHED-!” He only managed half of the threat before his throat closed again, pushing back another wave of slime as it tried to creep up from his spark. His optics stung like a flashbang had been thrown in front of them, damp and blurry- oh Primus, if it was coolant he'd tear both of them out… no, not coolant. More ooze. More grease aching to get out. And like that covering his limbs, trapping him like a vulgar statue, it was threatening to freeze his face. It was freezing it- his optics wouldn't close, his glossa weighed down by the black still dribbling past his throat, trapped by lips glued shut.

 _‘Get… Dreadwing… Knockout…_ somebody…’ Even if he could speak, there was no longer anyone around to hear him. They had obeyed in a rush of peds towards the door, so eager to abandon him once they'd been given permission. By the time anyone did fetch Knockout, it would be too late. He was going numb, cold despite the steam that wicked from his heavy liquid shell. Vents clogged, audials stuffed, with only his optics pinned open. The only sense left to him was the cruelest one, forced to watch himself become helpless. 

All because of the Insecticon, the ones now infesting his ship and stealing his resources. The ones he foolishly allowed to live. The one now right in front of him… 

Drugged red optics lazily met his own, mandibles and claws scratching together in a minute, taunting range of movement. Megatron hadn't notice him entering, only knew that one second he was looking at no one and the next he was faced with the source of his misery. A mindless, lab-tinkered bug had ruined him while traitors and war heroes never came near.

The injustice of it all made him break his silence, fury so hot that it melted the slime that muzzled him faster than it could grow back, broken black shards flying out past his denta as he spat. 

“You… YOU DID THIS! YOU AND ALL OF YOUR FILTHY KIND!” The splinters showered against the Insecticon, who cocked his head as they hit him like nothing more than a mist of water. “I’LL… I'LL HAVE YOU ALL _EXTERMINATED_!”

The creature trilled in protest, that awful cry to summon more and more of itself, yet an even more terrible sound quickly dwarfed it. More painful than Starscream’s cawing, more frustrating than Knockout preening. More telling of misery than the crack of a nuclear warhead just before it obliterated itself and the planet around it.

When the likes of Airachnid could be heard laughing, all anyone else could do was weep. 

“My, My, Megatron. I'd ask what crawled into your spark and died, but… I already know.”

Megatron’s audials were still useless, but it wasn't a matter of hearing her. When she spoke, moved, when she so much as threw a glance somewhere, he felt it somewhere even deeper than his spark. He knew her, more than just on instinct. He _knew_ her, and that was all he did know.

She uncurled herself from her pet’s back, hidden so well within its obsidian plating until she stretched her legs, as if she was languidly waking from slumber.   
Her heels clicked once on the floor of the ship, _his_ ship, and she seemed to glory in finding her way to the heart of the Nemesis again. Only when she dragged her optics along the walls, seeing each station housed in the curved hollows left empty, the viewport shuttered to leave the chamber dark aside from the arbitrary glow of files left open and the data within, did she even bother to look at Megatron. She was amused.

“I have to say, with how long it was taking I was almost worried that it wouldn't work.” She was close enough to show his reflection in the coals of her optics, a pink-hued mockery where only his own optics and denta bared in a razor snarl could be seen under the swarm of sludge. A single talon, wickedly sharp as the femme baring it, dragged its tip along the solid-yet-liquid surface oozing over his cheek. A thick dent was made, and he thought he felt the claw tear slightly across the buried protoform before it pulled away with a string of the substance clinging stubbornly.

“Then again, it's been so long since I've made a new one this way,” Airachnid mused, ever cryptic and ever infuriating as she flicked the oil off. “But I knew my patience would pay off.” She flashed a grin just to taunt him further, only for a second before she motioned to the Insecticon who carried her in. The familiar monster dragged out a response from the pit of its throat and moved out of sight; as he exited, Megatron heard the chorus of the rest of the hivemind waiting outside, barricading the only entrance. There would be no rescue, but that never occurred to him. It wasn't her, so he didn't think of it. He _couldn't_ think of it… not with her voice so close.

“You didn't really think I'd just let you walk away after killing one of my precious soldiers?” A tut jumped over her poison-soaked glossa. “No, no, my dear. I admit, chemistry isn't my strength, but it wasn't too difficult making the Insecticons’... _condition_ contagious. After all, did you forget that I was the one who helped Shockwave tame them, create them?”

He didn't forget. He didn't even know. All he knew was Airachnid- in a blur of pain and broken sensed, there she was in a light of her own making. There she was before him, only him. 

He wanted to reach out, to touch her and know if she was as entrancing as that light… but he couldn't. Why couldn't he move? She was so close, but just too far away… why was he trapped? Why couldn't he…

Break… free...

“Air… Airachnid…” Megatron’s jaw cracked as it forced the shell apart, his denta scraping away as much as it could. Even if he couldn't free his body he chipped away at her hold, summoned the last of his strength to shove her out of his mind in a wave of white hot fury.

She stumbled, surprised to either hear him speak or to see him still resisting. But her recovery was as instant as her retaliation. As if in response, the viscous stain spread even more aggressively, filling in the tiny gaps he'd painstakingly made and finally blinding him as it took over his optics.

The loss of his sight hurt less than her gloating growing all the more louder without it to distract him.

“That oil oozing all around you is just the cocoon forming,” she told him, each word like a worse-than-death sentence. “It’ll take care of the rest of the work, while the virus rewrites your CNA. After that… you'll be all mine. My greatest creation.” She must have opened the viewport as a rush of thunder echoed from eons away, yet even that was minuscule compared to her voice in every direction of the darkness that swallowed him whole. Now he really was swimming in it. Open or closed, he still saw her. The light was still there.

He wanted to touch her...

“Not much longer now, Megatron. The virus should be in your processor by now. Don't bother fighting it… just relax. Don't worry about the Decepticons while you're in there. I'll take good care of them.”

Yes. She would. Because she was Airachnid. So beautiful and charming.

_Treacherous, evil, fragging glitch._

Stunning in her grace, striking and ruthless and all the more elegant for it.

_Spineless, honorless, good for nothing but the scrapheap._

She was his queen.

_She would be **dead.**_

She graced him with her voice one last time before the darkness took what was left of him. “I can't wait to have you under my spell again…”

Under the cover of thunder, one last act of rebellion fought vainly against that spell.

_I can't wait to tear your spark out._


End file.
